


The Hand

by paleolithic_demitasse



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: Episode: s01e13 End of Days, Episode: s01e14 The Christmas Invasion, Episode: s04e13 Journey's End, Gen, Humor, Post-Episode: s01e14 The Christmas Invasion, Post-Episode: s04e13 Journey's End
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-14
Updated: 2016-10-14
Packaged: 2018-08-22 10:08:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8282081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paleolithic_demitasse/pseuds/paleolithic_demitasse
Summary: The Hand was quite content to remain just a hand. Being a hand in a jar offered one a unique perspective on the world, which could have been a lot of fun, had the Hand not been a hand. Hands may not be capable of having ‘fun’, but the Hand would settle for being in a position where such a thing remained a possibility.This is the story of the Tenth Doctor's Hand, and how it touched the lives of those who came across it.Not literally. That thing is in a jar for a reason.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for Torchwood Fest Day Four (shudders), for the prompt the Doctor's hand. This was a lot of fun to write, and I thoroughly enjoyed exploring the different perspectives on the story of the Hand.
> 
> This is even more un-beta'd than usual, since I'm tired and just wanted to get this up. Enjoy!

Yvonne Hartman had not been planning on taking an extra hand home, but when one finds a disembodied appendage on a London sidewalk the same day that an alien spaceship was hovering over the city, one cannot afford to take chances. Naturally, Yvonne took matters into her own hands, so to speak. Needs must, she supposed.

Perhaps the whole fiasco would have been a tad more bearable if the hand hadn’t been lying in a pool of blood that had presumably once been inside of it. A perfectly good handkerchief and quite possibly a very expensive handbag had been ruined. She’d have to wait and see what the dry cleaners could do.

What a merry Christmas this was turning out to be.

 

* * *

  

When Rajesh Singh was given a hand and an assignment to study, document and preserve said hand as a Christmas gift from his boss, he was less than impressed. The whole alien ash debacle was enough of a handful as it was.

The studying part was unusually easy. It was a hand. White skin, chopped off at the wrist by some sort of blade, and judging by the size, belonging to an adult human male. Or, considering the fact that this was Torchwood and nothing was ever so simple, some kind of humanoid. DNA testing had… interesting results. Not human, but not anything else on file, either.

Weird.

 

* * *

 

Of course it was. Of course his best lead on the Doctor in over a century was a chopped off hand. Jack Harkness was thoroughly unamused, yet somehow unsurprised. A hand. A bloody hand. Not any more, he was assured; the hand had been cleaned up very carefully and was currently resting in the most state-of-the-art – read: definitely alien, only just simple enough to use – preservation fluid that Torchwood had in its vast stores. Supposedly, it had been guarded day in and day out since Yvonne had begun to speculate about its origins. Because the situation wasn’t ridiculous enough as it was.

At least Jack got a laugh out of imagining the bright young Torchwood protégé defensemen, probably highly-trained ex-special forces operatives, assigned to awkward shifts of guarding a hand in a jar.

Talk from the inside of Torchwood One was that the hand they’d recovered belonged to an alien life form that had been on the ship when it was blasted out of the sky. Everyone had their own theories on what purpose a non-human humanoid could possibly have had for being on board at the time – ranging from slave-trade accusations to human impersonation conspiracies to speculation about a certain kind of, shall we say, entertainment – but those who knew enough about the Doctor to place him on the ship during his regeneration had sussed out the truth. The hand was Gallifreyan in origin. Time Lord was one of the few species that Torchwood bumped into frequently and yet had not managed to get on record, which, knowing the Doctor, probably pleased the last of them greatly.

Jack had an informant under strict instructions to give him news whenever anything Doctor-related happened. At first, he’d thought that the whole hand thing was a prank, but apparently, it seemed the universe had just developed a sense of cosmic humour.

He had died twice trying to get his hands on, well, the hand. The second time had been perfectly explainable: Jack had been shot in the leg fleeing the Torchwood Institute building after his cover had been blown. He’d bled out in an alleyway. The first one had been slightly less dignified. On the day he’d planned to execute his elaborate hand-heist, the one variable that Jack had forgotten to take into account had been the weather. As he’d broken out into an over-excited jog towards the Torchwood headquarters, Jack realised seconds before his head hit the pavement that it had rained earlier that morning. He woke up in a hospital to a crowd a screaming nurses, two hours behind schedule.

But he’d gotten his hands on the prize eventually. If anyone ever asked an inebriated enough Jack about how he’d ended up with a hand in a jar, he’d just leave that chapter out of the story. Dashing heroes don’t trip and die from slipping in puddles, after all.

 

* * *

 

Owen Harper hated the hand. He was a medical man, a rational man (mostly). He knew perfectly well that hands, especially hands not attached to a body, could not see. That didn’t stop him from feeling as though there was a pair of invisible eyes trained on him whenever he played Tetris at his desk. Owen would whip around, expecting to see Jack looming over him, arms crossed and face tightened into a frown. All he’d see would be that hand, bobbing up and down ever so slightly in its jar. Owen’s mouth would twist into a snarl, wondering how it was that an inanimate hand had bigger attitude problems than he did.

Hands did not laugh. Hands in jars, even less so. Nevertheless, every morning when Owen walked into the Hub and the giant metal door rolled shut behind him, that hand taunted him. It looked disgusting, it never did anything useful and it had terrifying glow-in-the-dark qualities that Owen only knew about because of the time he had been working late with only the lights in the medical bay still on, and had screamed in horror into the (thankfully) empty Hub when he’d seen what looked like a glowing, floating blob levitating near the exit. If hands could laugh, it definitely would have then. At him, not with him.

Why was he plagued by constant judgement from this hand? Who knew; maybe Owen was just projecting his irritability and insecurity onto one of the few constant presences in his life. Maybe he had some kind of deep rooted psychological problem, or perpetually unbalanced hormones responsible for what Tosh called his ‘constant man-period’. Maybe the hand genuinely didn’t like him.

Whatever the reason, he still hated that hand.

 

* * *

 

Fascinating. Gross, but fascinating. Toshiko Sato realised that it wasn’t normal to be so enthralled by an appendage in a jar, but that certainly wasn’t stopping her.

The hand was a mystery, and Tosh loved mysteries, almost as much as she hated when they went unsolved. She often wondered where it had come from, why it was here in the Hub, and why Jack found it so important. It was very clear that it meant something to him. He’d stare at it wistfully sometimes, when he thought neither she nor Owen nor Suzie were watching. Tosh found herself making up histories (and futures, depending on whether or not she was assuming it had fallen through the Rift) for that hand, complex stories with well-developed characters and satisfying plot arcs. It passed the time, for sure. Even if nothing else about the hand was.

It must be alien, Tosh was almost certain of that. If it wasn’t, why would it be in the Hub? Jack kept all his personal mementos in his office or out of sight. The jar was right next to the door, like a display in a museum, just asking to be gawked at. She often did, just for the sake of it. Strangely, one of the most human-looking fixtures of the Hub was among the few that never lost their novelty or charm.

Tosh told herself one day she’d ask Jack about it, what he knew about it, or she’d ask Owen to run some tests and find out what he could about it. Alas, disembodied hands in jars are surprisingly uncommon topics of conversation, and Tosh never felt like it was the right time to bring it up with Jack. Talking to Owen about something that wasn’t strictly work related felt like an even bigger hurdle to jump, so for the time being, the hand remained what it was.

A mystery.

 

* * *

 

Suzie Costello had considered taking the hand of out the jar for a number of reasons. The most frequent one was when she had the urge to slap Owen with it. She’d also considered using it as a projectile (again, aimed at Owen), a snack for Myfanwy (Ianto had discouraged that idea) and once, to try and recover the pen that had rolled under the couch (in the end, she’d handled that using the hockey stick that Jack kept in the armoury).

Most recently, Suzie had been wondering whether she could bring the hand back to life in any capacity using the resurrection gauntlet. Or maybe she could stuff it into the glove and show Jack, just to see the look on his face. She’s thought about it, but ultimately decided that she valued her life above what would admittedly have been quite the practical joke.

 

* * *

 

Gwen Cooper may not have known Jack Harkness for very long, but it did feel out of character for him to let a girl possessed by alien sex gas get away over a hand in a jar.

She hadn’t seen everything, but she was a police constable (ex-police constable now), and she’d put the pieces together very quickly. What Gwen still didn’t understand was why Jack had risked everything for that hand. When she’d asked him about it afterwards, he’d given her a cryptic reply about an excuse to go see a doctor, and refused to say any more on the subject. The look on his face when he’d held that hand after its case had been shattered, as broken as the glass strewn across the floor, had spoken volumes more than his direct response to her questioning.

As with most matters concerning Jack, the rest of the team didn’t seem to know any more than she did. Gwen would have investigated further if she thought there was anything worth finding, but there was always something more important at hand, and eventually she forgot about the whole thing.

The hand was still quite creepy though.

 

* * *

 

Ianto Jones was glad to see it gone. Or so he told himself. It explained a great many things that the only item Jack had taken with him when he’d left apart from the clothes he’d been wearing and the hand in the jar. He’d had his suspicions, but Ianto knew now without a doubt that the hand had something to do with the Doctor.

The way Jack had looked at it – it made sense now. It was the same longing Ianto had begun to recognise in his eyes whenever Jack talked about the past, outside of telling his extravagant tales of heroics and debauchery in time and space. Whenever Jack honestly reminisced about what had come to pass, the same wistfulness, the same nostalgia, the same loss would come into his eyes as when he looked at the hand.

Ianto had been over the security footage of the Carys incident on Gwen’s first day, trying to figure out just what it meant. Jack had said that the hand was worthless to everyone expect him. Ianto had puzzled and obsessed over that until it became decidedly unhealthy, and then some.

Now it was gone. Maybe it was just because he hadn’t been expecting it to suddenly disappear that Ianto couldn’t shake the feeling that something was missing. He didn’t doubt that it sent a very clear message about his life that it felt stranger to him to come into work every morning and not be greeted by a hand in a jar than it was to have a hand in a jar a work in the first place. More likely he was just bitter that Jack had left without as much as a note.

Where before he’d felt all manner of feelings for Jack, now there was just a numbness. Some days, the thought of not having a familiar object that meant something to Jack was as soul-crushing as the fact that Jack was gone. His office was left untouched, and it wasn’t as though he’d cleared out his bunker (Ianto would know, he’d been sleeping there sporadically, on his own, since Jack had left), but it still felt like Jack had taken the most important part of his life in the Hub, of himself, with him.

Ianto wished every day that it could have been him.

 

* * *

 

Martha Jones found a number of things about Jack very peculiar, but the fact that he had followed her and the Doctor to the end of the universe with a backpack containing nothing but a hand in a jar had to take the cake.  Some things just were not normal, and this was so far from normal it almost belonged in the bleak, ravished landscape of the distant future.

Although Jack was charming, some oddities left a lasting first impression. If there hadn’t been so much going on at the time – amongst other things, the end of the universe – Martha might have re-evaluated her views on the Captain based on that particular attribute. But stranger things were afoot than a hand in a jar.

 

* * *

 

It took very, very peculiar things indeed to make the Doctor uncomfortable. As someone who was nearly a millennium old and travelled through the universe exploring all manner of people and places, the Doctor had grown accustomed to the unexpected. Still. It would take a better man than him not to be weirded out by having his own hand, in a jar, knocking about the TARDIS as he went adventuring.

It wasn’t alive. He knew that at least. Sometimes, the Doctor wondered why he kept it. On a few occasions, he’d been tempted to toss it into a passing sun, or have it delivered to the Shadow Proclamation headquarters. The Doctor had done none of these things. The hand, if it was possible, seemed drawn to the man it had come from, and who was he to argue with that?

The TARDIS didn’t seem to mind, and Donna only teased him about it from time to time, so all was well.

 

* * *

 

Donna Noble did not like the idea of travelling around with a hand on board. It was thing to go gallivanting across the cosmos with a madman in a time machine, and another thing to that with a hand, his hand, just lying about. Donna knew all too well she was in no position to complain about the hand. She complained about most things, but this hand had been there since before she started travelling with the Doctor in the TARDIS, so she knew she held no jurisdiction over its presence. Unfortunately.

She would have liked to see it gone, but not even Donna could have imagined how that happened in the end.

 

* * *

 

The Hand was quite content to remain just a hand. Being a hand in a jar offered one a unique perspective on the world, which could have been a lot of fun, had the Hand not been a hand. Hands may not be capable of having ‘fun’, but the Hand would settle for being in a position where such a thing remained a possibility.

Hands could not see or hear, and this particular Hand was no different in any of these regards. However. Seeing as this Hand was quite an important hand in the grand scheme of the universe, by some cosmic plan unbeknownst to the Hand, the gift of vague general awareness was bestowed upon it. As far as gifts go, the Hand’s may not have been the most exciting, but by the time it was hurtling towards the core of the Crucible, the Hand was not only the best travelled and most educated of disembodied hands, but also had some degree of understanding as to what it meant to be in such an extraordinary situation (both in terms of the worldly wisdom and the rapid approach towards destruction). Not that it would matter when the Hand was nothing more than vaporized particles.

Or so the Hand had been led to understand.

As has been previously stated, if the Hand could express a preference that in any way resembled human likes and dislikes, the Hand would have clearly communicated its desire to stay as it was. The universe, on the other hand, had a different plan. More specifically, a biological metacrisis born of regeneration energy.

Had the Hand had any say in the matter, this would not have been the case. After all, it was really quite excellent at being just a hand.

 

* * *

 

It all worked out for the best, seeing as the universe had been saved and all. The Doctor (the metacrisis Doctor, not to be confused with the Doctor with two hearts who had not grown from a hand) was rightly pleased with the outcome what had been a very eventful first few hours of existing.

Still, part of him – that is to say, the appendage attached to his right arm – did sometimes miss the days of being but the Doctor’s hand in a jar.


End file.
